IBM launches the open-ovf project

Scott Moser from IBM’s Systems Technology Group has released the first version of the open-ovf project. OVF is a standard packaging format for virtual machines and software appliances. The open-ovf project is seeking contributors and users to help establish OVF as a transparent and platform-neutral method for packaging virtual machine images.

The goal of open-ovf is to be able to deploy a single OVF package to either Xen or KVM.
Eventually expanding that list to include VMware, Hyper-V, and other platforms. For that goal they are looking at community contributions. A good start might be the qemu-img tool that already knows how to convert between different formats.

For a summary of OVF and the open source project, see the presentation from the recent Xen summit
The open-ovf project is hosted on sourceforge and the source code is available from it’s git repository

About the author

Kris Buytaert is a long time Linux and Open Source Consultant active in Belgium , Europe and the rest of the universe. He is currently working for Inuits
Kris is the Co-Author of Virtualization with Xen ,used to be the maintainer of the openMosix HOWTO and author of different technical publications. He is frequently speaking at, or organizing different international conferences
He spends most of his time working on Linux Clustering (both High Availability, Scalability and HPC), Virtualisation and Large Infrastructure Management projects hence trying to build infrastructures that can survive the 10th floor test, better known today as the cloud while actively promoting the devops idea !
His blog titled "Everything is a Freaking DNS Problem" can be found at http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/